Volcano Street by David Rain

inky black, shivered and swayed. Branches creaked.
    ‘Bet you never done this before,’ said Honza.
    ‘Why d’you reckon that?’
    Skip remembered a night last summer. Karen Jane had been rhapsodising again about San Fran, about how their lives would change entirely from the moment they arrived in that place to which they had never been, which became in her descriptions the Land of Oz, Adventure Island and the Woodstock Festival all rolled into one. Suddenly, she could not say why, Skip felt the sickening certainty that they would never go there – never, not even if the place was real. ‘It’s all dreams!’ she cried. She was sick of Karen Jane’s dreams that never came true. Her mother gazed at her, hollow-eyed. She told Skip she was a stupid, ungrateful girl and Skip told Karen Jane she hated her; then she ran out of the flat and along the beach until she could run no more. She slumped in the sand and stared out to sea. It frightened her – its blackness, its immensity – but she watched and watched. The sounds it made, its suckings, its sighings, were words she did not understand but felt compelled to learn. Where would she be, she wondered, in ten years, in twenty, in fifty, in a lifetime? It was too much to imagine, impossible, yet all that was certain was that time would pass and pass. Her mind drifted, and her body too, floating on the blackness, until Marlo found her and shook her awake. Karen Jane had been too stoned to come.
    ‘So it’s into town and back?’ Skip said now.
    ‘Volcano Street. Up and down.’
    ‘What sort of game is that?’
    But it was exciting. Was there really a ghost of Crater Lakes? How Skip wished there were! In the dark, with the torch making fuzzy luminous tunnels, ordinary sights of the day appeared touched by strange magic. Eerily the beam played over tussocky verges, potholes, twisted trees.
    They talked about whether ghosts existed. ‘Don’t reckon so,’ said Skip. ‘They’d have proved it by now.’
    ‘Who’d have proved it?’
    ‘Scientists.’
    ‘They don’t know shit. There was this farmhand on the Kenny place, back in the old days, got his head chopped off in the combine harvester. Every year, on the night this bloke died, you could see him in that paddock, under the big old bluegum – just a body, no head.’
    ‘Bull.’ Honza, Skip knew, was trying to frighten her.
    ‘He held the head under his arm.’
    ‘Bull.’
    Paved streets were upon them now. No cars passed; in the space between Sunday night and Monday morning, the town slept as if beneath a spell: drawn blinds, darkened windows. Behind a fence, a dog let out a mournful howl; afterwards, the stillness was deeper.
    They walked in the middle of the road. Honza turned off the torch. Streetlights were dim and set far apart, each one offering only a urinous yellow trickle. Skip looked into carports as if shapes might lurk there. Leathery bushes rose like sentinels in grassy front yards.
    ‘Frightened now?’ Honza whispered.
    ‘Course not.’
    ‘What if we get caught?’
    ‘Who’d catch us?’
    ‘The ghost of Crater Lakes!’
    ‘As if …’ Skip laughed.
    Honza seemed affronted. ‘There’s this movie I saw on TV one night. Dad reckoned I weren’t allowed to watch it, but Pav stayed up so I snuck out and watched it with him. There’s this bloke, see, he has this waxwork museum. He’s, like, a genius at making waxworks that look like real people. Then there’s this fire, and the bloke gets all burned up.’
    ‘Vincent Price,’ said Skip. ‘I’ve seen that movie.’
    She had never forgotten it: not the wax figures ablaze, not the boiling, bubbling vats of wax, not the hideous burned face of the sculptor when finally it is revealed. She adored Vincent Price. In a Price movie there was a secret, and the secret, she sensed, was thatthe one most haunted was Vincent Price, even if he was the monster others feared.
    ‘Remember after the fire?’ said Honza. ‘His face is all scars and his